Grace Canterbury | Sports and Arts & Culture Editor | gcanterbury@mail.smcvt.edu
been teaching at St. Michael’s for 29 years. Photo courtesy of Adrie Kusserow.
When Adrie Kusserow was 19 and trekking in the Himalayas, she got separated from the group and was lost. “I ended up staying in a Monks meditation retreat cabin. I was all alone and fending off rats at night, and the next day the Monk came and brought me tea. I ended up staying there for a number of days and I would say that was the moment where I felt like this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I wanna do.” said Adrie Kusserow, department chair and professor of sociology and anthropology.
Kusserow, a native Vermonter, has been teaching at St. Michael’s since 1996 when she was 29. “My family and the land I grew up on was very important to me so I applied to every college I could in Vermont, and St. Mike’s had an opening,” Kusserow shares. Her focus has been directed on the impact of global media on youth identity in Bhutan, critical studies on sex trafficking and the exploitation of young girls in the brothels of Darjeeling, India, and as an accomplished poet. Some of her classes here at St. Micheal’s include; Anthropology of Refugees, Culture Illness and Healing, Social Inequalities, Creative Ethnographic Writing, Anthropology of Emotion and Addiction, Introduction of Anthropology, and Anthropology/Sociology Capstone.
Jason Hirsch, a professor of sociology and anthropology at St. Michael’s, shares, “I am sure her students feel the same way, I have the pleasure of working with her. She’s incredibly warm and I think her style has a rich philosophical understanding but her style is also very poetic. I think this comes through in her classes and her writing for sure, but it also comes through in what it is to now
her.”
Alex Meade, a senior majoring in Sociology at St. Michael’s, has taken three courses with Kusserow. “She really tries to relate with the classroom…she makes the classroom comfortable by opening up and sharing her hardships,” Meade said she prioritizes input from the class and offers discussion-based courses. “There are two sides to Adrie. You either don’t like her teaching style because it’s a lot of work and may seem like too much, or you appreciate the experience-based learning and broad perspective she gives you,” Meade said.
Meadediscussed her openness regarding her work with refugees worldwide and locally in Vermont. By doing so, he believes students receive a thorough understanding of what they are studying and the type of individual Kusserow is. “It’s the personability she gives to you…that’s pretty rare with professors. It’s okay for professors to get personal in the classroom, that’s what helps us connect with the course and you.” Meade shares.
Kusserow’s courses aim to be as action-oriented as they can be. She drives a discussion-based classroom where students are asked to “question their deepest-deepest-deepest assumptions about the world and about reality.” Kusserown said it’s much more fascinating and productive when the classroom is a setting that allows students to ask “out- there” questions.
“There is a lot I have to say about education which is higher ED. I just feel like classes are not necessarily a feel-good place where all your hopes, dreams, everything is confirmed; education can be awkward and make you question some really deep assumptions and I think that’s good,” Kusserow said.
Kusserow’s college experience was not what most would refer to as typical. She began her studies at Amherst College and quickly realized it wasn’t what she expected. She did feel like she related to the campus culture. However, during her first year she studied Tibetan Buddhism under Robert Thurman, who later became her advisor, and Kusserow stated, “That class changed my whole life.”
19-year-old Kusserow traveled to Nepal and Northern India in the fall of her sophomore year to live in a Tibetan refugee area. She returned from Nepal, where she then developed a newfound love for Amherst and connected with groups of people who shared her interests and values.
Upon her return Kusserow said she wanted to ask “really big questions about the world and about existence and god” and this prompted her exploration of creative writing. After completing her undergraduate degree in English and a minor in religion at Amherst, She would continue her studies at Harvard Divinity School where she received her Masters in Comparative Religion. “Harvard’s Divinity School was a completely different atmosphere, very accepting, very down to earth,” said Kusserow.
After receiving her Master’s, Kusserow went on to attend Harvard grad school for her PhD in Social Anthropology. Here she, “ lived this double life taking poetry classes but also Anthropology,” shared Kusserow. “Harvard’s grad school was a harsh environment, very lonely, very isolating…It was not a warm supportive place, it was really not an enjoyable experience at all,” Kusserow shares.
Her passion for anthropology and drive to unveil the serious questions and states of the human condition and nature can be traced back to Nepal. “I was 19 and I was suddenly sleeping with a Tibetan refugee family and my whole world was turned upside down. I’d never encountered extreme poverty, I’d never encountered refugees, Tibetan Buddhism, or a life that was so highly spiritual that there was no difference between everyday life and Buddhism.” As this was her first travel experience, it opened her eyes and mind to the cultural and world diversity, and she sought to explore further, “It was way out of my comfort zone and I think I’ve never been the same since because you can’t be exposed to such difference and then not look at your own life in a very different way.”
While numerous rewarding adventures have highlighted Kusserow’s life, she said she has faced significant challenges that have shaped her life and professional work. At the age of 9, Kusserow’s father died in a car accident. “I don’t think I ever totally recovered from that,” she stated. “I was suddenly hurled into these big, existential, theological questions that most 9-year-olds don’t think about.” She would continue to walk through life with this weighted feeling that at any given minute something bad could happen.
As Kusserow began viewing the world in a lighter light, she was then diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 and thyroid cancer in 2022. As she overcame these challenges Kusserow shared, “I have a propensity towards catastrophic thinking sometimes.”
Hirsch shared, “Some of Adrie’s writing is incredibly joyous and exulting even. I’m not of the opinion that all good art comes from pain, but I think that it is one thing that hardship creates and gives rise to a range of deep emotions. When you can write out of the depths of hardship, when you’re in an acute emotional connection to what that means for you as a writer, that creates a reading experience that allows readers to feel into their own emotional place more deeply.”
Through her teaching and field work Kusserow comes back to this question, “how can humans tolerate so much inequality”. She spent a decade researching refugees, specifically girls, in South Sudan and Uganda who were facing challenges that lingered due to war. In South Sudan, she founded an NGO, a non-government organization, under the name Africa Education and
Leadership Initiative. The organization is structured to bridge gender gaps through education.
After achieving a World Bank grant, the NGO founded a highschool school in South Sedan to foster these beliefs. However, Kusserow speaks on the complications faced with this initiative, “I couldn’t go back there now or I would be killed, and our school at this point is probably decimated by rebels.”
One of the biggest setbacks faced with fieldwork and the push to resolve world issues is war. “A big obstacle is safety and war,” Kusserow said. “I haven’t been back there in a while and I am unable to”.
From her transformative time in Nepal to her extensive research on refugees and global inequality, Kusserow’s work spans a wide range of topics, each grounded in her desire to understand diverse cultures and the conditions that shape human lives. Kusserow recently published her new book of poems, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems. This new book captures her experiences with refugees and humanitarian projects through poetry.
“I think that she sees the world in a poetic manner, and I think that helps us in our department to stay grounded in the attention of beauty and the attention to which human beings are poetic creatures,” says Hirsch. Her approach to teaching, which fosters deep questioning and personal reflection, encourages students to think critically and engage with difficult subjects in a meaningful way.
“I am pretty open about who I am and it’s not like I really hide it. I publish these books which are basically a tell everything about my life. I read those pieces in class, so I think students have a pretty good sense of me,” said Kusseror. Her unique perspective and dedication to education strive to leave a lasting impact on both her students and the broader field of anthropology.